As with most trends, many flocked to it without a second thought. But the reality is that the majority of dropshipping businesses, sadly, do not end up as inspirational success stories. Online retail can be a ruthless industry and, therefore, it becomes even more crucial that you get your campaigns right. To avoid being one more casualty in this throat-cutting industry, we’d recommend you get your digital strategy right by studying these e-commerce marketing mistakes that cost others dearly.
Devoting too much time to the wrong things
Many times marketers devote too much time to tasks such as coming up with a business name or crafting a custom logo design that are not as important. Instead, they should rather focus their time on writing good content, SEO and metadata. This brings us to our next common e-commerce marketing mistake…
Poorly written product descriptions
To sell your products online, you only have photos and product descriptions to help you. When you realise this, it makes sense then why you should make content a priority (over other design elements like logos and colour combinations).
In short, your product description should not just merely tell your customers about the specific product, but instead, it should take it one step further and sell the product to your customers. If you have a big list of items, start with the descriptions of your highest-selling products and then move on to the rest.
That being said, words cannot do all the work by themselves! Make sure there are also big, beautiful, high-quality product images that do not take forever and a day to load. To achieve this, simply convert them to JPEGs files. Alternatively, you can also use GIF for images that use flat colours.
That being said, many times marketers focus only on image size and forget that composition and background are also deal breakers. The product that you are selling should at all times be in the most prominent position and stand out from the web page’s background.
Neglecting email marketing
While your click-through and open rates decrease with every extra email that you send, the opposite is true for your order rate. Studies have found that if you increase the number of promotional emails that you send, you can increase the likelihood of getting more orders.
Now to take advantage of this statistic, it is important that you send your emails to the correct target audience. In other words, you will need to segment your target audience. One strategy is to divide your email list into two groups. The one group should be 20% of your customers who frequently make purchases and the second group should be the remainder of your customers.
The group with the customers who complete purchases more often should receive more emails from you, while the other group should receive fewer emails. In short, by segmenting your email campaign in this way you will be applying the Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) that suggests that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers.
Trying to sell to everyone
You need to identify a specific target audience, in other words, pick who you view as your perfect customer. Then, make sure that you understand their values, needs, interests and culture. By taking the time to gather data on your perfect customer, you can create a more focussed marketing campaign that your customers can relate to better.
What is more, market research will also help you to identify which new products will perform well. At the end of the day, a fun product is of no use if it will only remain in the carts.
Ignoring how customers interact with the website
The right information can empower you to ensure that your online business does not merely survives, but thrives. In today’s day and age, there is a wide range of tools available that can help you to understand your website visitors’ behaviour better. You can, for instance, use heatmaps to identify which elements of your web page design your website visitors interact with the most.
Armed with this information, you will have a much better understanding of how your website visitors find their way around your website and which factors might prevent them from proceeding to checkout.
Failing to delegate
For your e-commerce business to grow, you need to learn how to delegate. Delegation becomes even more crucial when you realise that e-commerce marketing is not as simple. To get the best results, you will have to focus on search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing and pay-per-click campaigns (PPC) to mention only a few examples. Not only will you most likely not be familiar with all these areas, but it is also much more cost-effective to enlist the services of professionals who can help you to achieve your targets faster.
Print on Demand
Here at Printsome, we’ve always supported creative endeavours which is why we’re proud to announce our brand new ‘print on demand’ service.
Thanks to our five years of experience in the apparel-printing industry, we were able to design a platform catered towards the needs of artists and designers who want to start their own T-shirt line. Printsome’s ‘Print on demand’ service has no minimum orders and can print any design with no colour limitations.
From the moment you connect your online shop (like Shopify) with our platform, anyone can buy one of your designs. We deliver all over the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. Drop shipping has never been this easy.
Why worry about inventory or logistics when we can take care of that? We deal with the boring stuff so you have more time to do what you love. To find out more, simply visit our brand new website.
